Both the Sniper Pod and LITENING pod are used by the USAF. Both have their use cases, and both are extremely potent. But being forced to replace the LITENING pod with the Sniper pod is a downright abysmal decision to make, just enable both to be used.
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Is there something the Lightning pod does that the sniper couldn’t?
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I think it’s currently technically not possible. Planes are set up to only be able to use one type of targeting pod. Hopefully in the future they fix this and allow you to take whatever you like (like in DCS).
You’re definitely not the only one having problems with the narrow fovs it has as per the evaluation document of its use on the B-1B:
Spoiler
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Litening has a very nice WFOV of 18°, which allows for spotting aircraft or just quickly repositioning your SPI around the map through it. Sniper is limited to a 3.6° WFOV, which makes it a bit less friendly. 3rd gen thermals of the Sniper is nice though.
But the addition of Litening AT or something would’ve combined best of both. Though, Litening should technically not be able to use the 18° fov as WFOV, as it’s a solely for navigation (and it fixes itself forwards), but then again there’s already NAVFLIR pods that bend the same rule. Sniper has no such mode.
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Jeez man, your right. I just tried it out and damn, that fov, is horrendous. The picture quality is crisp, but it’s something I’d sacrifice in a heartbeat for better situational awareness.
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Yeah if you prefer wide FoVs, Sniper is actually the worst 3rd gen flir pod in the game currently. Smallest WFOV currently, with not even the highest zoom. Beating Damocles for smallest WFOV, but losing on max zoom against it, not to mention Damocles remains the only pod which can actually swivel more than 90° to the sides.
Though I suppose the intermediate WFOV can be nice at times, sadly at the cost of an actual WFOV.
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Gaijin has said ATM its not possible to add multiple TGPs on one aircraft. This is as TGP stats are actually tied to the plane and not the TGP. As internally all TGPs are just the same IR tracker sensor, with the flight model dictating the resolution/zoom/fov. This is also why sometimes the same TGP will have different resolutions on different planes.
Theres also a graphics issue where it tries to display both at a time if you have more then one, leading to model clipping.
This is why the F-2A only ended up with the sniper, and not the sniper + J/AAQ-2.
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The F-15E used the LANTIRN TGP before it was given the SNIPER TGP, which was a highly requested change.
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how does this work with the harrier GR7, Typhoon (The IRST works as a camera) and the Tornado GR/4? they all have access to internally mounted IR/Laser cameras and access to laser pods. does the game just disable those when you bring a laser pod?
You can still use those. And I am pretty sure that they can somewhat easily fix this issue in the future as well, they just didn’t now. Honestly it’s a bit of a mess if you look at the code.
Planes can currently have 1 internal, 1 external TGP, but multiple unique weapon mounted sights. The limitation with the weapon mounted sight views is however that having multiple overrides the worse (depends on how it’s set up I guess) sights, so not every single one can be used at the same time.
They may be able to add multiple TGP support in the future. It might just be as easy as adding an extra variable, or string value rather. Currently we have " " for internal, “targeting” for TGP and “tv” for weapon mounted sights. So maybe they can create one like “targeting2”, but idk how much more messy it looks much deeper in the code.
Actually now thinking about it, we don’t even need that since we can’t mount multiple TGPs anwyay, so it can just reuse the “targeting” optic type, it’s just a matter of a FoV problem, where currently one one set of FoVs (which regulate zoom) can be assigned to the TGP type sight. For this they may have to use the same way, or create an additional string value afterall, as weapon mounted sights, where their FoVs are assigned inside their respective weapon files. They could also handle FoV the same way they handle NV/FLIR resolution, where they can seemingly add as many as they want, but assign it an index, which then is assigned to each respective sight.